I'm thinking about setting up a RAID 1 array on a new computer. I'll probably be using 2 Western Digital Caviar 320GB drives (the new AAKS models). I understand I'll see a performance drop, but these drives will be used for storage, rather than any programs, and as I've got quite a good bit of data I don't want to lose, I figured it would be a relatively cheap way of giving me a bit more security in case of a hard drive failure (if my programs drive goes down, I can just reinstall, but if my data's lost, then we have problems).
What I was wondering was whether I need any extra hardware to do this. I'm fairly (OK, completely) new to building PCs (I have a reasonably good theoretical knowledge, but no practical experience), so if this will be massively complicated, then I won't bother, and just get hold of an external hard drive, but the automatic backups of my data would be very useful. So, how hard is it to do, and what would I need?
What I was wondering was whether I need any extra hardware to do this. I'm fairly (OK, completely) new to building PCs (I have a reasonably good theoretical knowledge, but no practical experience), so if this will be massively complicated, then I won't bother, and just get hold of an external hard drive, but the automatic backups of my data would be very useful. So, how hard is it to do, and what would I need?